The Bookindy app could boost trade for independent bookshops.
Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

Independent booksellers have launched a new weapon in their two-pronged offensive against online retailers such as Amazon and the supermarket chains who pile books high and sell them low.

In a neat piece of entrepreneurial oneupmanship, the Bookindy app uses Amazon’s own technology to upstage it, answering its inventor’s question: “Can you promote local independent bookshops on the very system that’s designed to destroy them?”

The app is an extension for the Google Chrome browser which, when downloaded, changes slightly how the Amazon website looks when you open it up. Alongside the Amazon price, the Bookindy inserts a box showing you the cheapest price of that book from an independent shop – and how far that shop is from where you are standing.

Marketed with the tagline “browse Amazon, buy independent”, Bookindy gets its information from the online indie retailer Hive, which describes itself as the place “where the two worlds of online purchasing and high street shopping collide.”

Founded in 2011, and backed by a network of local bookshops, the Hive boasts that “every time you make a purchase you are supporting your local independent shop as well, just by continuing to do what you love – buying your books”. The Bookindy, which is free to download, will crunch all the data from Hive network, helping those who – in the retailer’s words – “love the ease and luxury of shopping online, but don’t want to see the bricks and mortar shops on the high street disappear”.

The app is the latest move in a battle for hearts and minds on both sides of the Atlantic, which swept back to prominence this week when the American fantasy author Ursula K Le Guin decried Amazon’s expanding influence on the bookselling business and by extension on which books are published and promoted.“Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment,” she wrote.

Ceative director and entrepreneur Will Cookson, who invented the app, explained his reasoning on the site medium.com: “I slipped into the convenience trap. I happily ordered my Ballards, my Murakamis, my Carvers from Amazon without giving much thought to my local independent bookshop, just 10 minutes from my home. Amazon is convenient. For lazy, laptop-in-bed, impulse-purchase people like me Amazon is a dream — it offers me a familiar catalogue of books, ready to purchase with a click and get delivered next day. They might not pay much tax in the UK, but when time is so precious and it’s that easy, do we really care?”

But Cookson decided that he did care, and was going to do something about it. He said: “I wanted to build something that doesn’t compete head-on with the Amazon machine, but embraces it, augments it and nudges you towards the local option to buy. The Bookindy Google Chrome extension gives you the price of the book in your local bookshop whilst browsing Amazon. Bookindy embraces Amazon’s well-ordered and familiar catalogue for browsing and allows you to buy the book from your local independent bookshop shop if you want to.”

Independent bookshop owners are well aware of the customers who come in, browse the shelves and then order the book from Amazon. David Ford, who runs the Saltaire Bookshop in West Yorkshire, says: “You do get an awful lot of people who browse then disappear and never come back to buy the book. It’s so easy to order online – they can scan the barcode with their phones and be taken straight to an online retailer like Amazon.”

Ford welcomed the new app, saying: “Anything that helps bricks and mortar retailers has to be a good thing. And I honestly think that independent shops can be cheaper than Amazon – a lot of customers just assume that Amazon is the cheapest and buy on autopilot, but you have to factor in postage costs as well.”

Bookindy app search

A roadtest the morning after the Baileys Women’s prize for fiction revealed that the Saltaire bookshop 4.8miles away could offer no competition for Ali Smith’s winner How to be Both (heavily discounted to £4.49 on Amazon, as against £7.49), but that it was offering another recent bestseller, Giulia Enders’s Gut, for 4p less than Amazon.

For Cookson the price is not the key issue: “I now browse Amazon and then buy books from Dulwich Books, my local independent bookshop, 0.8 miles away. I sometimes go and pick up in the shop but more often, books drop through my letterbox. I sometimes pay a few pence more, sometimes a few pence less. With Bookindy I can remain lazy, impulsive and order books from the comfort of my bed. But the niggle has gone.”